Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
These lines have been taken from "To Autumn" by John Keats, the youngest of the romantic poets. These lines are addressed to Autumn. Here the speaker's questions suggest that Autumn does not have the music that spring has, and so, he consoles it to be happy with what it has.
These lines occur at the beginning of the last stanza of the poem. By asking these questions, the speaker passes on from the sense of sight described in the second stanza to the sense of hearing in this stanza. Autumn does not have the sweet songs of spring but it has its own sounds. They are: the wailful choir of small gnats, the bleating of lambs. the whistles of the redbreast (robin) and the twittering of swallows. These sounds are in fact not music but Autumn has to be satisfied with these pieces of music; they are its own. However, there are some critics who do not agree with this simple objective interpretation. They think that the poet himself is involved in these lines. Keats was haunted by the thought of death. He, because of his suffering from TB, never had the joys of youth. Perhaps, in these lines he asks himself in a mood of self pity for not having the joys of youth. He did not have them. So, he consoles himself. This subjective interpretation of these lines seems to be an exaggeration. In the total design of the poem, the poet has remained "objective, oblique and impersonal". The poet's own passions are not directly involved in this poem. The "dying-day" and the "gathering swallows" refer to the law of mutability that Keats presents here objectively.
